IT managers at large corporations and government agencies spent boatloads of money on software and services. The big systems integrators like Deloitte and PWC made a fortune. The computer industry press was saturated with doom and gloom stories and marketing people at tech companies worked overtime coming up with ways to frame their products as the only hope for survival. Crazy days.
They made a lot of money because early programmers didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Companies that didn't fix their shit, had their shit break.
Part of the issue, especially for big banks and large government agencies, was that many of their mission critical apps were written in COBOL decades earlier. Source code management tools and processes were primitive, institutional knowledge about patches built upon patches over the years had faded, and very few COBOL programmers were left in the US workforce by the 90s. Lots of ongoing system maintenance was done by programmers from Russia and other Eastern European countries.
Yes, early programmers didn't know what they were doing. Companies that didn't fix their.shit had their shit break.
They probably knew what they were doing but didn’t know where they were going. They earliest programs were built upon hierarchical databases to perform simple tabulations of what they thought were large numbers of records. Over time, new capabilities were required which meant more row and columns, more sophisticated calculations, time series formulas, and on and on. Stuff the original app designers and programmers never imagined. Just how computer generations rise and fall. From the mainframe age to mini computers to client server computing to the web to virtualization to the cloud, etc. Discovery of new possibilities makes things break and become obsolete.
They didn't plan for the future. I e. They didn't know what they were doing because they failed to plan their languages properly. Make excuses al you want ...they were the problem...not the companies hired to fix their fuckup
Not making excuses or blaming anyone. It’s just how computer languages and architectures evolve. Spent 35 + years in the industry and have seen these cycles unfold.
Awesome. I'm still in the industry and saw first-hand companies bottom out trying to recover from their lack of investment to fix the issue.
The software and services companies that profited from Y2K delivered valuable products that addressed real needs. I worked for one in the late 90s. And yes, the issue was hyped by the IT press and by marketing departments across the industry. Hype waves come and go in the tech industry. New innovations and new business problems come along and everyone wants to catch the wave. If you want a really good example of IT people creating train wrecks by not knowing wtf they were doing, look at SAP implementations done in the 90s and early 2000s.
It was hyped because it was needing to be hyped.
Here's a fact for you, the crazed moon-barking zealots who appointed themselves as saviors of the World all flew into Davos on over 1000 private jets to demand the rest of us consume less.
I’m searching your post for a fact, but I don’t see one. What makes you think that consuming less is anybody’s demand?
